Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space

After Thatcher

K. Duff

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137429346
• eBook ISBN: 9781137429353
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike.

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‘The Script That Has Been Eradicated from the Street’: Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory, Julian Barnes’s England, England, and the Spaces of English Heritage

This chapter examines Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) as it explores the process by which the spaces of London are re-imagined, fictionalized, and commodified through the policies and practices of the English Heritage industry. In doing so, this chapter unpacks the ways in which English Heritage ‘theme-parks’ (Wright) English history and, as a result, deeply alters the spaces of the city. Both Sinclair and Barnes trouble the ways in which the marketization of English history profits from a manufactured authenticity since, as Dr Max in Barnes’s novel suggests, everything is ‘constructed’ (136) for a specific audience or consumer.

Iain Sinclair has taken the spaces and spatiality of London, especially the East End of London, as his critical focus and engagement for much of his literary career. Specifically, works such as Downriver (1991) and Lights Out for the Territory represent the urban spaces of London through fictionalized accounts of local historical spaces and identities in a way that disrupts and troubles the idea of a locatable, mappable, official history of London. Downriver, written a year after the end of Thatcher’s 11-year term as Prime Minister, is a psychogeographic narrative anchored by the river Thames that traces the tentacles of Thatcherite policies of privatization and deregulation as they disrupt local history and identity. Sinclair refers to his own work as a ‘mythology’ that blends together, for example, various historical accounts with creative illustrations and characters. As Sinclair suggests, ‘some characters are fictional with true stories’ (Sinclair ‘Personal Interview’). Sinclair’s approach draws attention to the ways in which we write ourselves upon the city, and in turn are written upon, through representation rather than fact. In Sinclair’s writing, where the boundaries between actual historical accounts and the author’s own impressions are often difficult to discern, London is a palimpsest that oscillates between historicity and imagination. Downriver, then, is a perambulatory fiction of the city that confronts the disassembling of the welfare state, the privatization of public space, and the rupture to traditions such as independent bookselling. In Downriver, Sinclair seeks to uncover, and perhaps reinsert, the ways in which the spaces of the city are not merely the containers of its history, but are rather dialectically engaged with the identities that move in and through the city.

For Sinclair, the struggle between local, often working-class, historical urban identities and Margaret Thatcher’s version of English national identity is most evident in the East End of London. With its varied and often stigmatized past, the East End was easily incorporated into Tory attempts to sanitize and make marketable a resurrected nostalgic colonial-Victorian English national identity through, for example, the preservation of cottage houses or the rhetoric surrounding the Falklands War.¹ Such Tory efforts percolate Sinclair’s desire to move through ‘the real city’ as he documents the dialectic minutiae of history, space, and the individuals that he encounters, purposefully or accidentally, during his urban dérive. It is specifically such uncovering of historical spatiotemporal detail, what Paul Newland calls ‘territorial excavations,’ that provides the richest sediment in Sinclair’s work (1). Sinclair’s writing, what we might call a process of becoming within the urban, seeks to uncover the fictions, what he calls ‘our lies,’ planted amidst other deposits and ‘lies’ within the urban spaces of London (Lights Out 237). This chapter takes up Sinclair’s later text Lights Out for the Territory as it writes back to the Thatcher period at the same time that it works to imagine the ongoing fallout of the Thatcherite epoch.

Sinclair’s work explores the way that Thatcherite policies of privatization, coupled with the English Heritage industry, complicated, manufactured, and remapped English identity for profit (both political and financial). Lights Out for the Territory re-imagines the scalar narrative of local spaces of the East End of London as a counterpoise to English Heritage’s attempt to hijack and, in turn, erase the legacy of local working-class identities. With this in mind, and in order to uncover the foci of Sinclair’s urban heritage narrative, I examine his use of the trope of the map as a means of writing the city: a kind of reclamation of a distant and now fragmented past eroded by the firestorm of Thatcherite free-market economics and the creeping death of community. Ultimately, I argue that Lights Out for the Territory mythologizes, and at the same time makes impossible, a singularly authentic mapping of the spaces of London.

Lights Out for the Territory thus meditates on the dialectic relationship between local sociocultural histories revenant in urban space and the identities that live, and have lived, within them. While Sinclair confronts Thatcherite nostalgia through his marked distaste for 1980s gentrification and development, he also specifically explores, complicates, and convolutes England’s English Heritage-manufactured ‘authentic’ and privatized English identity. He draws attention to the idea of history as a representation based on specific interests and motives, and, in so doing, troubles any claims to authenticity such as those made by Margaret Thatcher’s heritage project in the 1980s. With this in mind, I examine Lights Out for the Territory as a sociohistorical fiction of the often-fragmented histories and identities rooted in and through British urban space. Sinclair’s text focuses on the street, the architecture, and the local (often subversive and/or forgotten) histories and identities, what he calls a ‘patina of obscurity,’ through ‘an accumulation of details, fragments, scraps of urban landscape and history,’ as he attempts a DIY heritage project that disrupts the possibility of imagining the city as cohesive, mappable, and ultimately marketable (Lights Out 33).

For its part, Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) imagines a kind of hyperbolic dystopia of the commercialization of English history and the ways in which the heritage project empties out space in place of profit. While Sinclair’s work disrupts the English Heritage project by reinserting local histories and identities in a way that troubles our expectations of the spaces of history, Barnes’s novel erases all evidence of local history and identity through the development of a historical theme-park built exclusively for tourists and their expectations of Englishness. As Arthur Aughey suggests, the conceptual return to a distant past enacts ‘the transformation of England from an industrial and military power into a heritage theme park’ (162). While Aughey does not name specific examples, Julian Barnes’s England, England takes the criticism of theme-parking English Heritage to its comically bitter conclusion. In Barnes’s novel, the theme-park ‘England, England,’ located on the appropriated spaces of the Isle of Wight off the coast of the ‘real’ England, eventually usurps the original ‘old England’ as where English history and identity reside. Barnes’s parodic narrative is thus a rewriting of English history for those that desire the ‘authenticity of the replica’ and not the original artefact (Barnes 57). The result, then, is an engineered simulacrum of English history that disregards the timeline of history in favour of the spatial representation of the artefact, where tourists can visit to enjoy ‘what they already know’ (74).

In order to lay the foundations for my discussion of Sinclair’s urban excavation and Barnes’s parody of English Heritage, I begin this chapter with the debate around heritage taken up by Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel, Robert Hewison, and Patrick Wright as it relates to ideas of local and national identity, as well as ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity. Specifically, I focus on urban working-class neighbourhoods, such as the Docklands in the East End of London, as they have been uprooted and almost entirely erased as a result of the nexus of English Heritage and private investment. This process thus significantly altered the ways in which working-class identities formed a continuous historical connection with those spaces.

Keeping this in mind, I will touch on the example of the Docklands development in East London as I discuss the ways in which the revitalization and internationalization of historic spaces became the cure for, as Lord Heseltine suggested at the time, inner-city decay. The first section of this chapter, then, looks at the ways in which the national investment in heritage, particularly in its focus on architecture and landscape, attempted to inject British cities with spatial representations of a prescribed historical national identity. As such, this investigation incorporates the theories of Stuart Hall, John Corner and Sylvia Harvey, Robert Colls, Robert Hewison, Raphael Samuel, Patrick Wight, and Bill Schwarz in order to uncover the ways in which the increasing attention, both financial and cultural, given to heritage throughout the 1980s not only altered urban landscapes but also affected the ways in which citizens lived within those landscapes. This return to a temporally distant, and specifically English, exclusionary history and identity propelled a shift in landscapes and the gentrification of those areas.

Heritage and national identity: Theme-parked identities and the erasure of the unmarketable

While a particular discourse of British heritage has been around for most of the twentieth-century (Samuel), the late 1970s and, in particular, the 1980s saw a surge in the activity of heritage preservation as the Thatcher government sought to subvert the feeling of national decline that had prevailed in Britain since the Suez crisis – something Thatcher coined the ‘Suez syndrome’ (Thatcher, Downing Street 8).² The National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983 exemplified the Tory preoccupation with resurrecting a patriotic and culturally significant historical national identity through a particular focus on material representations of that history.³ The acts provided the funds and basic infrastructure for securing and restoring various landmarks, artefacts, and buildings to a historical time period that represented a politically desirable English identity (Corner and Harvey; Hall ‘Local/Global’; Samuel).

However, while many heritage spaces and landscapes were publicly funded, they were often left in private hands to restore. For many Britons, ‘ “national heritage” [had] become something of a national obsession, even though no one [was] sure what it mean[t]’ (Colls 356). The English Heritage website defines the protocol for establishing heritage spaces. Specifically, the four values that are considered in establishing a heritage site include: ‘evidential value,’ relating to specifically significant architectural design and construction; ‘historic value,’ meaning that the building was constructed at a pivotal point in British history, or the way in which the building was used or inhabited in some way contributes to a historical understanding of English identity; ‘aesthetic value’; and ‘communal values,’ referring to spaces intended to contribute to ideas of community (often these were ‘experiments in social housing’ such as ‘Trellick Tower’ or Park Hill).⁴ As I argue in the second part of this chapter, Sinclair’s writing works to oppose the ‘pivotal point’ of historic value that English Heritage focuses on as he looks to a continuous transformation of space through time.

However, as Sinclair positions the discursive practices of the heritage industry as the nexus of Lights Out for the Territory, the sociopolitical meaning of heritage remains a contentious point. Stuart Hall defines heritage as ‘the whole complex of organizations, institutions and practices devoted to the preservation and presentation of culture and the arts – art galleries, specialist collections, public and private, museums of all kinds . . . and sites of special historical interest’ (‘Whose Heritage?’ 23). For Hall, the idea of heritage is caught up not only in the ‘preservation and presentation of culture and the arts’ but also in the modes by which they come to be preserved. Historical national identity, then, became institutionalized through ‘organizations, institutions and practices’ – a process that Barnes’s novel hyperbolically represents as it foregrounds the marketization and consumption of English history and identity. It was particularly during Thatcher’s reign that ‘the word “heritage” [became] the principal label for a variety of often very different evocations, projections and embodiments of national and local “pastness” and pride’ (Corner and Harvey 48). The ‘organizing, and frequent institutionaliz[ation]’ of historic national identity and ‘pride’ eventually gave rise, as Corner and Harvey suggest, to ‘an astonishing growth in historical tourism’ (48). However, as both Hall and Corner and Harvey agree, the kind of historical identity that much of the heritage industry wished to promote was an exclusive representation of Englishness that often left out seemingly unmarketable local working-class populations, not to mention diasporic and immigrant identities. As Arthur Aughey suggests, many scholars recognized that the fact that heritage was being used as a tool for economic and political vibrancy was a lesser problem than ‘Thatcher’s attempt to prescribe the contents’ of heritage and, as such, the fact that ‘history was being hijacked by Thatcherism’ (16). In this sense, both Sinclair and Barnes foreground such ‘hijack[ing]’ as heritage became a re-signifier and rewriter of space. As Sinclair and Barnes suggest, while many spaces of English Heritage sites underwent Thatcherite reinvention through privatization and marketization, the narratives produced around them failed to include, for example, contemporary struggles of class and race. As such, the official heritage narrative invoked a kind of sociocultural amnesia in an effort to write the story that would sell to the most tourists or generate the most desired patriotic form of ‘imagined’ national identity (Anderson). The past was being reinvented, as Hall suggests, through the Conservative myth founded on neoliberal tenets of the deserving citizen rather than the Labour socialist myth built upon a desire for unionized state support.

The heritage project, then, amounted to the restoration and preservation of the historical significance of specific sites or cultural artefacts that represented a desirable representation of English history and identity (Hall ‘Whose Heritage?’; Hewison; Wright Journey; Corner and Harvey). As David Harvey suggests, the turn to a manufactured national identity

reveal[s] something of a great potential importance because it is indeed the case that the preoccupation with identity, with personal and collective roots, has become far more pervasive since the early 1970s because of the widespread insecurity in labour markets, in technological mixes, credit systems, and the like.

(‘Postmodernism in the City’ 87)

Identity, as the Tories were keen to profit from, has always been spatial. As Smith contends, ‘it is not just that space and society “interact”; a specific historical logic (that of capital accumulation) guides the historical dialectic of space and society’ (Uneven 106). In keeping with Thatcherite economic ideals, the raising up and commodification of historical Englishness was concomitant with the revitalization of a national identity and economic stability that no longer relied on socialist economics or national industry, but rather on a global economics of tourism and trade that was, at its core, spatial. As Hewison argues,

the ‘heritage industry’ [was] expected to more and more replace the real industry upon which this country’s economy depends. Instead of manufacturing goods, we are manufacturing heritage, a commodity which nobody seems able to define, but which everybody is eager to sell, in particular those cultural institutions that can no longer rely on government funds as they did in the past. (9)

As far-reaching union strikes, revolts against immigration, recession, inflation, and deindustrialization became hallmarks of British life throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the turn towards heritage as a new national industry that could invoke a sense of shared national past consisted, arguably, in killing two birds with one stone.⁵ Tourist dollars could partially make up for losses from national industry while simultaneously forging a new sense of national pride and identity reinstalled by the Tory party. Stuart Hall invokes Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ when he spotlights the significance of a ‘shared national identity [that] depends on cultural meanings, which bind each member individually into the large national story. . . . The National Heritage is a powerful source of such meanings’ (‘Whose Heritage?’ 26).

While ideas of exclusion and racism have been part of the British struggle throughout the postwar period, it is the commercial aspect of the ‘heritage industry’ that rewrote English identity for the postmodern era in a way that was, according to Hall (2005), Corner and Harvey (1991), and Schwarz (1991), exclusionary and elitist. The result was the advancement of exclusionary local politics as working-class identities were displaced and gentrified in favour of creating commercially viable tourist destinations. Patrick Wright argues that the National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983 were ‘respectful but commercially-minded’ in a way that promoted a ‘reanimation’ of history as ‘a way forward in [the] new world of theme-parks and mass tourism’ (On Living in an Old Country 150). Such reanimation is at t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: The Spatial Turn: Dialectics of Space and Identity
• 1. ‘The Script That Has Been Eradicated from the Street’: Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory, Julian Barnes’s England, England, and the Spaces of English Heritage
• 2. ‘House Arrest’: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, Thatcherite Council Estates, and the New Under Class
• 3. ‘Space, Production, and Identity: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, and Powellite Englishness
• 4. The Spaces of the Thatcherite Body: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Will Self’s Dorian
• Conclusion: Thatcher in Space, or the Spaces of Thatcher
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index